Those aren't pions, Amos, I think his cat has dandruff. Didn't you notice the feline hair on the back of his chair? My calico has dandruff also. I wouldn't presume to confuse it with scientific particles.

AHA!!! The pion may be chargeless, sir, but not your hapless self. We'll have YOU brought up on charges, both positive and negative, for this wanton serial pionicide. That spray is a weapon of massive pion-destruction. You're for it now, old kipper!

I was at fencing when you posted that. It is, without doubt, the single most important thing I have ever read. It has changed my life. I can now crack eggs and not get bits of shell in the egg. I can leap tall buildings with at least a single bound. I can drink beer and not spill any. Most importantly, I know approximately how long I have to put up with these damned pions! Here I am, sitting quietly, whiling away the hours slamming protons together just for the hell of it, and WHAMMO! suddenly I'm surrounded by a flock of pions! No quark-antiquark pairs, just these damned pions, buzzing around and stinging. And no Gluon, of course!, there to help -- Gluon's off doing something slightly impolite on a rug in the 7th dimension or somewhere. Well, I think that it's the most important thing I've read, mostly because I'm nearly out of pionicide spray.

M O O O M!!

They've figure out the duration of the PION!!

"THE LIFETIME OF THE CHARGELESS PION, the lightest particle made of quark-antiquark pairs, has been determined to higher levels of precision in a new experiment at Jefferson Laboratory in Virginia. According to experimentalist Liping Gan (Univ of North Carolina-Wilmington), speaking at the APS meeting, the neutral pion lifetime is one of the few quantities that can be directly calculated (to about 1% precision) in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong force, which holds together quarks and quark-containing objects. In Jefferson Lab*s Primakoff Experiment, the researchers aim a gamma-ray beam at nuclei, which perpetually has a cloud of photons around it.

Through a phenomenon known as the Primakoff effect, two photons (one from the target nucleus and another from the photon beam) interact and make a chargeless pion, which decays into two daughter photons. Measuring the daughter photons reconstructs the details of the decay and provides lifetime information about the pions. The new experiment is more precise than past Primakoff effect experiments because the incident photons (produced from the deceleration of Jlab*s electron beam) are "tagged," meaning that the researchers can keep track of the numbers of incoming photons hitting the nuclear targets, as well as their energies. When the photons emerge from the decay, an advanced calorimeter (called HyCal) is able to measure the daughter photons' trajectories and energies to high precision.

Ashot Gasparian of North Carolina A&T State University said the calculated lifetime of the pion is 82 attoseconds with about a 2.9% error [(8.20+/-0.24)x10^-17 sec]. The new, preliminary result is two times more precise than the present value published in particle data tables [8.4+/-(0.6)x10^-17s], and the precision can potentially double as researchers analyze all of their data and finalize their result."

Quite right. Given the magnitude, it is possible that we have inadvertantly stumbled on the 'elephant's graveyard' of hot air -- the final resting place of all the overheated, over-inflated gaseous emission to rise up from the halls of government since Alexander Hamilton started the practice.

My aunt and cousins lived in El Cajon in the same house for many years. The municipal boundary kept changing, so actually, part of that time they lived in La Mesa. (Five changes total, I think she told us).

I had the strangest breakfast on a road trip in Idaho Falls. We sat down at a breakfast place and I ordered what I usually do, French toast. This humongous plate with two three-inch thick chunks of some big fried thing arrived. "Our cook likes to do it a little different," the waitress beamed. I tried a bite, then ate something else. I think they should warn people when the recipe varies that much, know what I mean?

A giant cloud of superheated gas 6 million light years wide might be formed by the collective sigh of several supermassive black holes, scientists say.

The plasma cloud, detailed in April 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal, might be the source of mysterious cosmic rays that permeate our universe.

"One of the most exciting aspects of the discovery is the new questions it poses," said study leader Philipp Kronberg of Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. "For example, what kind of mechanism could create a cloud of such enormous dimensions that does not coincide with any single galaxy or galaxy cluster? Is that same mechanism connected to the mysterious source of ultra high energy cosmic rays that come from beyond our galaxy?""

Today we wandered over to the desert suburb called El Cajon, where a recently-discovered firend, a lady who plays wicked blues harp, was playing at a restaurant with her tight, well-grooved blues band. They had a sax, a drummer, a bass, two electric guitars, a horn player and of course Diane knocking them dead on the blues harp. It was fine.

Although I hadn't mer her before, she needed someone to cover for vocals so I volunteered to do one number. So I ended up knocking out "Mojo Working" with a completely smooth electric band behind me, and the audience just roared, they had so much fun. BBW was in the audience and said it was perfect. So I am really stoked about that. We rocked!.

Yesterday I did something that was, in its own way, very frightening and even dangerous.

I went to Idaho Falls.

This might not seem like much, a trip of only fifty miles each way, but I went to Idaho Falls. The town where housing developments are walled and the walls extend for (literally) a couple of miles on each side of the street. The town with a "We're the best, so screw you" attitude (or so it seems).

But that's where the quilt show was, and so I went. Later we went to Barnes & Noble and bought some books on our August trip to Alberta and the one we hope to take next year to Ireland.

I did not go to Idaho Falls armed. Just to reassure Mom. I mean, I did have my pocketknife, but that was it.

I've warned you guys about watching out for poachers when I'm away. (That Nigel, he's egging us on, he is).

I went down to the arts fair and met John Hardly today. I think he has visited MOAB on occasion, though I don't know if he has ever posted. I gave us all a glowing review, so who knows! He says he has met Mom's other favorite son, BWL.

I think that I'll ask in the Help forum for a thread in the main forum asking for a thread in the help forum to undelete a thread somewhere else entirely. Following which I'll complain that just because the deleted thread was at Tweed's place there is no excuse for my being censored on Mudcat.

totally a different subject --- it really gets my goat when the "best/most rational/least damaging" response to falsehoods is silence; since that allows the falsehoods to remain unchalleged and thus liable to be taken as "truth".